Andrew Sullivan recently published an essay on the Obama candidacy in the Atlantic.  I support Obama, and I’ve always had a difficult time explaining why, even though it seems to me such an obvious choice.  Sullivan, I think, has helped me understand why I face that dilemma.  Policy-wise, there’s not a whole lot different from what any of the Democratic candidates are offering, and they don’t even differ all that much from the Republican candidates, Kucinich and Paul notwithstanding.  Sullivan suggests that its not an election about policy, but more about symbolism, and discusses why that’s not only not a bad thing, but why it’s crucial.

The past 7 years especially, and to a lesser extent the past 40 years, we have been constantly forced to choose between false choices:  Tough on Terror or Hate America?  God-fearing Christian or God-hating sinner?  Tax-and-spend socialist or responsible conservative?  In many ways, Obama forces the realization that these really are false choices while other candidates seem to reinforce them.  Sullivan pins this divide as a part of a Babyboomer tradition with roots in Vietnam that shapes the debate still today.  As the first post-Boomer candidate (along with Colbert), Obama represents a way out.  I don’t know much about the effect of Vietnam and Babyboomers, so I can’t really make a judgement, but I have experienced the either/or demonization over the past decade and do see Obama as the best solution. A few quotes…

On terrorism/US-Mideast Relations:

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

On faith:

His faith—at once real and measured, hot and cool—lives at the center of the American religious experience. It is a modern, intellectual Christianity. “I didn’t have an epiphany,” he explained to me.
…
To be able to express this kind of religious conviction without disturbing or alienating the growing phalanx of secular voters, especially on the left, is quite an achievement. As he said in 2006, “Faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts.” To deploy the rhetoric of Evangelicalism while eschewing its occasional anti-intellectualism and hubristic certainty is as rare as it is exhilarating.

On race:

The paradox of his candidacy is that, as potentially the first African American president in a country founded on slavery, he has taken pains to downplay the racial catharsis his candidacy implies. He knows race is important, and yet he knows that it turns destructive if it becomes the only important thing. In this he again subverts a Boomer paradigm, of black victimology or black conservatism.

So that’s all I got.  Really interesting way to frame both the current candidates and the current political landscape.  Read it, dude.